[Footnote 3: As far as regards the poets of ancient times, this assertion is, perhaps, right; though, if there be any truth in what Ælian and Seneca have left on record, of the obscurity, during their lifetime, of such men as Socrates and Epicurus, it would seem to prove that, among the ancients, contemporary fame was a far more rare reward of literary or philosophical eminence than among us moderns. When the "Clouds" of Aristophanes was exhibited before the assembled deputies of the towns of Attica, these personages, as Ælian tells us, were unanimously of opinion, that the character of an unknown person, called Socrates, was uninteresting upon the stage; and Seneca has given the substance of an authentic letter of Epicurus, in which that philosopher declares that nothing hurt him so much, in the midst of all his happiness, as to think that Greece,--"illa nobilis Græcia,"--so far from knowing him, had scarcely even heard of his existence.--Epist. 79.] [Footnote 4: I certainly ventured to differ from the judgment of my noble friend, no less in his attempts to depreciate that peculiar walk of the art in which he himself so grandly trod, than in the inconsistency of which I thought him guilty, in condemning all those who stood up for particular "schools" of poetry, and yet, at the same time, maintaining so exclusive a theory of the art himself. How little, however, he attended to either the grounds or degrees of my dissent from him, will appear by the following wholesale report of my opinion, in his "Detached Thoughts:" "One of my notions different from those of my contemporaries, is, that the present is not a high age of English poetry. There are _more_ poets (soi-disant) than ever there were, and proportionally _less_ poetry. "This _thesis_ I have maintained for some years, but, strange to say, it meeteth not with favour from my brethren of the shell. Even Moore shakes his head, and firmly believes that it is the grand age of British poesy."] [Footnote 5: Written by Lord Byron's early friend, the Rev. Francis Hodgson.]